CloudFlare Meetups: Set your mind on fire.

Education, expertise, and community: these themes define Meetups at CloudFlare. Meetups in our office bring together industry leaders, academics, and field experts to examine topics ranging from the Go programming language, to databases, to cryptography, and more.

Need an appetizer?

CloudFlare welcomed Brian Warner, a security engineer from Mozilla, to talk about cryptography. Brian’s work focuses on the security of the Mozilla ecosystem including Firefox Sync and Firefox accounts. During his session, he described the changes Firefox has made in the last few years, three different protocols they’ve used, as well as problems Mozilla faced and the compromises made between usability and security.

CloudFlare was also excited to have cryptographer and software engineer Michael Hamburg, PhD from Cryptography Research speaking on elliptic curves. Michael wrote his dissertation under the supervision of Dan Boneh at Stanford. His research indicates that elliptic curves have been the "next big thing" in cryptography for a while; however, they’re tricky to implement securely. Michael explains how Montgomery and Edwards curves give faster and simpler implementations, and Dan Bernstein's Curve25519 (aka Ed25519) have caught on, so there is increasing interest in a stronger curve that doesn’t sacrifice as much speed or simplicity. In this talk, he discusses his research findings—specifically, the "Ed448-Goldilocks” curve.

There's been a surge of interest in end-to-end security for applications like chat, text messaging, and email; in light of this, CloudFlare’s latest Meetup group included independent cryptographic consultant Trevor Perrin. Trevor’s work focuses on designing and reviewing cryptographic systems, making him well placed to inform our community. Moving away from deploying existing protocols like OTR, PGP, and S/MIME, Trevor discusses a number of projects working on "next-generation" protocols to improve usability, security, and protection for new forms of communication.